Tuesday, 6 January 2015

Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their houres;
And clouds their stormes discharge
Upon the ayrie towres.
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o'erflow with wine,
Let well-tun'd words amaze
With harmonie diuine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall waite on hunny Loue
While youthfull Reuels, Masks, and Courtly sights,
Sleepes leaden spels remoue.

This time doth well dispence
With louers long discourse;
Much speech hath some defence,
Though beauty no remorse.
All doe not all things well;
Some measures comely tread;
Some knotted Ridles tell;
Some Poems smoothly read.
The Summer hath his ioyes,
And Winter his delights;
Though Loue and all his pleasures are but toyes,
They shorten tedious nights.

Thomas Campion (1567-1620): Now winter nights enlarge, from The Third and Fourth Booke
of Ayeres, 1617

A fallow deer grazes in
Richmond Park, London, after a night of heavy frost as the temperature
dipped below freezing in the capital on New Years Eve: photo by Ben Stevens /i-Images via the Guardian, 2 January 2015

Harbin,
China. A visitor makes her way through a maze made of ice bricks ahead
of the 31st Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival: photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters via the Guardian, 4 January 2015

Moorhens wake up as the
rising sun begins to burn off overnight frost at the National Trust’s
Dunham Massey park in Altrincham, UK: photo by Christopher Furlong via the Guardian, 2 January 2015

The festival begins on Monday and will last about three months: photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters via the Guardian, 5 January 2015

A snowy owl at Gull Point at
Presque Isle state park in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was one of two tundra
owls spotted by birdwatchers on Monday at Gull Point. The dark markings
on this owl suggest it is either an adult female or juvenile: photo byChristopher Millette/AP via the Guardian, 2 January 2015

Manama, Bahrain.Bahraini anti-government protesters holding a national flag take cover from tear gas during clashes: photo by Hasan Jamali/AP via The Guardian, 4 January 2015

Bolney, UK.Morris
Men perform during an ‘Apple Howling’ ceremony at Old Mill Farm to
encourage a bountiful cider crop for the following year: photo byPeter Macdiarmid via the Guardian, 5 January 2015

Intimate craft sense of the weights and lengths of vowels and the way these invite, enable and and are in turn inflected by the singing voice -- a phenomenon of the age of English musicianship, nowhere better heard than in Campion, whose singular construction of an English metric along classical quantitative lines still remains to be fully understood and explored.

An investigation not likely to occur any time soon.

Ezra Pound held up Campion (along with Herrick) as models of the possibility of English lyric, and this instruction became the basis of the advance of the next poet after Pound (and possibly the last before the random shuffle deluge) to move our prosody forward -- or anyway in an interesting direction, and away from the glib, indolent, and slack.

Creeley, writing in The Black Mountain Review, 1954: "Thomas Campion... He gave his attention to the words and the rhythms which they carried in them, to be related then as they occurred."

Pound had been insisting all along that a good ear, a little patience and a bit of work might do wonders in this area. Those things, and an enquiring mind.

"The question of the relative duration of syllables has never been neglected by [poets] with sensitive ears": E.P., writing in 1934.